This past week has been the busiest
yet, and we’ve only just begun.
On Sunday, the final member of
our team (discounting Neal, who will be joining us when the other team is
finished with their work) arrived. With
the addition of Korey, I am no longer the youngest at the Lodge. He’s a pretty cool kid. I’m just sad that I have
to give up rolling around on all four beds in my room now.
We went on Monday to see one of
Jarrett’s advisers about proper bird handling and banding methods. It was an
interesting time to say the least. He caught the birds in mist nets—nearly invisible
mesh nests—he had arranged behind his house. We took them into the house and measured,
weighed, and banded them. It was a good thing we did it inside too. One of my
birds escaped my hand and flew toward the window to make its escape. It didn’t
quite work out as the bird planned though. The window was closed, and when the
sparrow hit it at full tilt, it knocked the little sucker clean out. Measuring
him was pretty easy after that.
Monday was the only day we
worked an 8 hour day. It was our shortest day by far.
After a month of waiting around
the Lodge and going on shopping sprees around South Dakota, I started the work
I was being paid for. Our day begins with bird surveys, which basically means
taking a count of what birds appear a 100m by 50m transect of land. We do about
four to six of those a day. They really are not that bad, and are somewhat fun.
The only problem with them is that, in order to actually see a good representation
of the birds out there, you have to start just past sunrise. And as all of our
sites are at least an hour and a half away, that makes for a wakeup time of 4
am at the best.
After that comes two different activities,
depending on the activity—either nest dragging, or nest monitoring.
Nest dragging is a super
high-tech process. We take a rope, strap it between two atvs and drag it across
huge tracts of land. Any time the rope scares up a bird, we check the area to
see if it was protecting a nest. It’s pretty simple, but takes a long time. A
lot of our plots are quarter mile or half mile by mile plots. Each one is full of birds. And ticks. I don’t
think I’ve seen so many ticks in my life. This is the part of the job that
takes the most time, easily pushing our days up to 12 to 16 hours long.
If we are not going to do nest
dragging, we do nest monitoring instead. This goes much faster, as we’re just driving
the atvs to the nests we have already found and monitoring their progress.
Hence, nest monitoring. I like that part of the job quite a bit.
Before this job, when I saw a
sparrow, it was just that—a sparrow. I
really couldn’t tell apart one from another. Now though, I could tell you the distinguishing
characteristics of an easy dozen or so and point them out to you. I think it’s
pretty cool, knowing you know more than you knew.
The
last few Saturdays we’ve driven up to Aberdeen to go to a bar called the Zoo.
After a few visits there I’ve come to realize that this is their version of
Rick’s. To put it in the words of one of the girls we met at the place, “People
go to the Zoo when they don’t want to go home alone.” The music selection there
is iffy at best, but I did get a round of applause while out on the dance
floor.
I
bought a bike the other day. Why? Because I like riding a bike, the only things
that aren’t farms around the Lodge are several miles away, and Walmart’s bikes
are cheap as free. I’m glad I did. The
first day I used it, I rode out about a mile away from the Lodge and ran into a
pack—heard? group?—of skunks. It was like something out of a spaghetti western.
It was noon…ish as the skunks and I stared each other down. A tumbled weed blew
between us. Then, as if on cue, the skunks turned as one and lifted their
tails. I spun my bike around and headed down into a ditch and out of the skunks’
line of fire.
Sometimes
while nest dragging we get things that we don’t expect. We find shed antlers—which
is always exciting—or garbage—which is not. Other times we scare up something else entirely.
One of our plots has wheat grass that grows up taller than me., so that the
other atv is lost to sight. Needless to say, while we were dragging that, all I
could think of was “Don’t go into the tall grass!” I was thinking that just as
I heard something rustling in the grass. I caught a few fleeting glimpses of
something moving in the grass. I thought it was either a trapped duck or a
deer. We had seen a number of them already that day. We reached the edge of the
grass and it wasn’t a duck or a deer that we had flushed. No, what came out of
the tall grass was a coyote. It was
close enough to pet it.
I love this job.
-Me
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